The federal government is bulking up Treasury Board with two new deputy ministers as part of the bureaucratic team being assembled to support new ministerial portfolios and created out of this week’s cabinet shuffle.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the job of Alex Benay, the government’s chief information officer, has been elevated to a deputy minister position, effective July 2. He also appointed Yazmine Laroche, the associate deputy minister at Infrastructure Canada, to become the first deputy minister of public service accessibility.

The new deputy ministers give more bench strength to Treasury Board, but they also align with this week’s cabinet shuffle, which gave Treasury Board President Scott Brison extended responsibilities as the first minister of digital government. Benay will be his right hand in that job.

Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough was given the added responsibility of accessibility, particularly steering recently tabled legislation into force to improve access for people with disabilities in the federally regulated sector. The public service is the largest employer in the federal jurisdiction and Laroche has been the deputy minister champion tapped to advance the issues of federal employees with disabilities.

Benay’s expanded role was signalled in the budget as part of the government’s effort to better protect the data of Canadians, while strengthening and securing the government’s IT systems.

Benay stepped into the CIO job more than a year ago with marching orders from Brison to be a “disrupter” and he has been shaking up the culture of the public service — which sees as the biggest challenge — ever since.

He and Brison have been a tag team of sorts, giving speeches and laying the groundwork for new policies and digital framework that will dramatically changes the way the government thinks about technology, as well how it buys, builds and uses technology. The creation of the Canadian Digital Services signalled the beginning of that shift, putting a swat team of tech geeks at Treasury Board to tackle IT problems and harness digital to help departments design and build better services.

The move also puts technology on and equal footing with human resources and finance in managing departments. Brison has long argued the CIO should have the same authority or ‘line of sight’ into departments as the Treasury Board’s comptroller general – the government’s chief financial officer – does into the financial standards of departments

Benay will focus on getting departments to bring their programs and services into the digital age to improve services to Canadians. He is also expected to be the lead on whatever system replaces the troubled Phoenix system that has botched public servants pay for more than two years.

The moves are part of the tweaks and changes the public service will undergo as Canada’s top bureaucrat Michael Wernick and deputy ministers assemble the team that will support new portfolios announced in this week’s cabinet shuffle without creating new departments.

“The prime minister is going into his fourth year and tweaking the political side going into the election. The bureaucratic side has to be realigned to match him,” said one senior official.

All told, 11 ministers either changed jobs or were added to cabinet and five had their responsibilities changed or expanded.

Some simply swapped departments where there are already deputy ministers to support them, such as Amarjeet Sohi, Francois-Philippe Champagne and Jim Carr to Natural Resources, Infrastructure and International Trade respectively .

Others take on responsibilities or expanded roles and have no departments so they will be paired up with associate deputy ministers or assistant deputy ministers to support them in their new jobs.

As a result, some departments are supporting more than one minister and some ministers are getting support from several departments. The most complicated is Bill Blair, the minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction, who has a policy portfolio cobbled together from Immigration, the RCMP and the Canada Border and Services Agency. His bureaucratic lieutenant will be Vincent Rigby, the associate deputy minister at Public Safety.

One senior bureaucrat said departments are much better at managing major policy issues that are scattered across many departments than 25 years ago. Today, departments are “platforms” that can support various ministers rather than departments having to be carved up, or pulled apart whenever a prime minister wants to shuffle ministers to new priorities. Global Affairs has three ministers and with the shuffle Innovation, Science and Economic Development now has four ministers.

The biggest advantage of creating groups or clusters of ministers under departments is it is much cheaper, easier and faster than carving up departments. The last big restructuring was in 1993 when the Conservative government reduced the number of ministers and departments from 32 to 23 affecting thousands of public servants.

Here are the senior bureaucrats supporting ministers in their new portfolios:

• Dominic LeBlanc, Intergovernmental and Northern Affairs, will be supported by Christiane Fox, deputy minister Intergovermental Affairs and Youth at Privy Council Office

• For Melanie Joly, who has Tourism, Official Languages and La Francophonie, her prime bureaucratic lieutenant will be Guylaine Roy, associate deputy minister at Canadian Heritage. Her tourism responsibilities will be supported by Paul Thompson, associate deputy minister at Innovation, Science and Economic Development.

• The various pieces of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction will be pulled together by Vincent Rigby, the associate deputy minister of Public Safety, for Bill Blair.

• Mary Ng, who picked up the Small Business and Export Promotion responsibilities will be also be served by ISED’s Paul Thompson.

• Filomena Tassi, the new Seniors minister, will be supported by Benoît Robidoux, the associate deputy at Employment and Social Development.

• Scott Brison, the Treasury Board President now also becomes Minister of Digital Government and his right hand for the job will be Chief Information Officer Alex Benay.

• Kirsty Duncan wears two hats as the Minister of Science and Sport. Her sports portfolio will be stickhandled by Andrew Campbell, assistant deputy minister at Heritage and her science portfolio will remain with David McGovern, ISED associate deputy minister.

While the government is unlikely to dramatically shake up the senior ranks of the public service after a cabinet shuffle, leaving experienced deputy ministers where they are, there may some changes to fill gaps.

The Public Service Rearrangement and Transfer of Duties Act, which goes back to 1918, gives a government flexibility to transfer powers, duties and functions across the bureaucracy.

This means the government doesn’t have to carve up, create or amalgamate a department or amend legislation for a department every time it moves a function.

The Trudeau government has created departments in the past. It dissolved Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development (INAC) and replaced it with two new ministries – Department of Indigenous Services with minister Jane Philpott at the helm and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs led by minister Carolyn Bennett. (Bennett lost ‘northern affairs’ in this week’s shuffle to Dominic LeBlanc.)

It is also making Status of Women Canada a permanent and full department as part of its commitment to a feminist agenda.

Wednesday’s shuffle, however, won’t require any major statutory changes.

The government, however, set the stage for the shuffle with Bill C-24, which amended the Salaries Act and the Financial Administration Act to create eight new ministerial positions with full minister salaries and departmental support.

The prime minister came under fire when five women named to his first cabinet, touted for its gender parity, were called ministers, but the orders in council appointing them called them ministers of state. Ministers of state are typically junior ministers, paid a lower salary and lack the full powers of a cabinet minister. They often assist senior ministers in large departments.

Bill C-24 made the five ministers of state full ministers, making them equals at the cabinet table with the same salaries as full ministers. It also left three flexible positions to be filled at the prime minister’s discretion.

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